The structure of a city via Twitter

From Mashable Tech.

Check out this gorgeous visualization of NY City's tweetopolis from Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer.

He plots out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

Similar viz of the east bay“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

This might be of use for our mobility project with our space.

More here.

Artisan basemap sandwich - a great name for a band, and a new basemap from ESRI

An example from southern caliEver admired those lovely muted gray maps from NYTimes and elsewhere that are in vogue now? Subtle, calming, with great figure to ground contrast? Canvases on which your data can pop? I know I have. Now ESRI cartographers add these options to their basemap collection. Read more about it in these posts:

Esri Canvas Maps Part I: Author Beautiful Web Maps With Our New Artisan Basemap Sandwich, and Esri Canvas Maps Part II: Using the Light Gray Canvas Map effectively.

From Greeninfo Network.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. Or maybe it is.

William Gibson (yes that one) in the NYTimes Opinion page, writes about Google, and the way it has changed how we interact with information and the world. It is a really interesting article touching on human choice, surveillance, and the catch-up game the law plays with technology. This visionary author of Neuromancer says "Science fiction never imagined Google..." and goes on to describe its omipresence, our ready participation in this process, and our discomfort at the result. He is a fantastic writer. Check it:

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.

Wow. Here is another example of his engaging and illuminating prose:

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon* prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy.

The title of this post comes from his oft-cited quote in 2003 in The Economist.

*About the Panopticon from wikipedia: The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience."

Welcome to Fall 2010 with this stunner of a pic from NASA

Mataiva Atoll, Tuamotu Archipelago, South Pacific OceanFrom the NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day: The Tuamotu Archipelago is part of French Polynesia, and forms the largest chain of atolls in the world. This astronaut photograph features Mataiva Atoll, the westernmost atoll of the Tuamotu chain. Mataiva Atoll is notable in that its central lagoon includes a network of ridges (white, image center) and small basins formed from eroded coral reefs. Mataiva means “nine eyes” in Tuamotuan, an allusion to nine narrow channels on the south-central portion of the island. The atoll is sparsely populated, with only a single village—Pahua—located on either side of the only pass providing constant connection between the shallow (light blue) water of the lagoon and the deeper (dark blue) adjacent Pacific Ocean. Much of the 10-kilometer- (6-mile-) long atoll is covered with forest (greenish brown). Vanilla and copra (dried coconut) are major exports from the atoll, but tourism is becoming a larger part of the economy.

This is not a satellite image, but a photograph taken by the Expedition 24 crew from the International Space Station (I think) on August 13, 2010, with a Nikon D2Xs digital camera using a 400 mm lens. More here.



If San Francisco Crime were Elevation

From Doug McCune's blog, the motto of which is: "I was Web 2.0 before your grandma was Web 2.0" which is kinda cute, gotta admit. Not that my grandma was ever anything close to that, she was a great baker though.

Anyway - he says: "I’ve been playing with different ways of representing data and I decided to venture into 3D representations. I’ve used a full year of crime data for San Francisco from 2009 to create these maps. The full dataset can be download from the city’s DataSF website." These are really rad and interesting.

He's chosen a solar illumination from the east, as it would be during sunrise.

He has a disclaimer: "These maps were generated from real data, but please don’t take them as being accurate. The data was aggregated geographically and artistically rendered. This is meant more as an art piece than an informative visualization." which is valid, but these are still really nice.

Denali's quilted pixels

The map portion of the quilt.Quilt detailThis is amazing. Denali Quilters created this giant (~10m2) quilt to interpret Denali National Park and Preserve's landcover types, based on an Earth Satellite Corp. classification. Each pixel is a 2 cm (!) quilt square (see detail at left).  Website here.

The Wandering 48

Radical Cartography's latest project the Wandering 48 is a beautiful illustration of the distorion inherent in projections.

Happy Holidays 2009! Map-related gift ideas for the economic recovery

Just in time for the holidays: a round-up of cool map-themed gifts and chotchkies for the house... when the economy recovers.

First, the incomperably beautiful (and justifiably pricey) map butterflies from image surgery. These ethereal beauties would look great on any wall. Check out this specimen at left.

A more solid but no less beautiful option is the customizable fruit bowl (or brooch, or table, or clock - is there no end to their creativity?) from FluidForm. You can pick your area from a google maps interface (multilple scales supported!), and they will create a one-of-a-kind 3-D bowl using computer-controlled router dealie. Just don't pick an island or your fruit will roll away.  Very cool. 

While technically not for sale, we can't omit the proliferation of wildly inventive and gorgeous examples of map art (some displayed here at inventorspot.com - look at this carto-fabulous ball gown!). 

And finally... If only this beaute was available: the 1920s-era proto-gps watch, complete with tiny scrollable paper maps printed on individual canisters of rolled paper. Look at those little tiny road maps. From Portable Content.

Manhattan in San Francisco Bay

 I love this scale comparison work by Bill Rankin, as posted on Radical Cartography.

http://www.radicalcartography.net/?manhattan

Leah Evans' Textiles: Maps as Quilts

Leah Evans makes these hand-sewn quilts that channel cartographic themes. Just like us, her current work combines aerial photography, maps, and satellite imagery. But unlike us, she uses appliqué, reverse appliqué, piecing, natural and synthetic dyeing, needle-felting, hand printing, and a variety of embroidery stitches. Intriguingly, she says it is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests her most of all. The maps themselves “are not consciously based on specific places,” she writes. “For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes.”